Tim Brown is the owner of Hook Agency, and strategic marketer focused primarily on driving traffic and leads for small businesses and construction companies.

Effective web design is important for any business as it can make or break a company. It’s often the first point of contact your customer has with your business, so making a good impression is crucial. Small businesses may not have the resources to market themselves in many different ways, so having a well-functioning and thought-out website that caters to your visitors will help drive success organically. If you haven’t given your website any attention in a while, it may be time to revamp your web design.

1. Have Clear Goals

Before revamping web design, it’s important to decide on why you are doing this. You should set clear goals for your website’s purpose, and implement a strategy according to them.

Are your goals to increase sales? Or perhaps you want to become an authoritative source of information within your industry? Or will you use your website as a branding tool? While you decide on the goals, also think about how to measure these goals. Revamping your web design will be superfluous if you don’t know how to measure what you’re trying to achieve.

2. Know Your Audience

As a business, it’s important to know that you are creating a website for your visitors, not for you. What you like may not be what your visitors want to see, so it’s imperative to get to know your audience.

Is your audience looking for specific information, or do they want to interact directly with your business? Perhaps they are seeking entertainment? The design of your website is dependent on this information. Find out what your most frequent visitors are interested in and create the ideal user experience for them.

3. Know Your Competitors

It’s always important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, and it’s also helpful when it comes to revamping web design for your small business’ website.

Have they recently made any big changes to their site? Are they performing better than you? Analyse their changes and take note. Of course, you don’t want to copy their design exactly, but you can take pointers from their design strategy and tailor it to your business.

4. Highlight Your Track Record

When possible, you should always highlight your work on your website. Incorporate your newest work, case studies, or customer testimonials. Regardless of your industry, find a way to communicate your expertise to your visitors when revamping web design. It will add credibility to your business, and your work will speak for itself.

5. Logical Website Structure

Your website’s architecture is very important when it comes to UX. You want the navigation to be as clear and intuitive as possible for your user. Think about how many tiers your website’s structure needs, how to display them on the homepage, and what to name your headers.

A logical site structure isn’t just valuable for UX, but it will also give you SEO benefits. One of the key pillars of good SEO is a clear website structure with relevant headers on your subpages. It’s good to spend a lot of time on this part, not only for your visitors but also for your organic search engine rankings.

6. Valuable Content With Relevant Keywords

The type of content you feature on your site will also have a huge impact on SEO. Create valuable content with relevant keywords to give your visitors the information they need, and to get search engines to favor you.

Conduct keyword analyses to ensure you are using the same language your ideal visitor is using and implement this in your content strategy. Be careful not to overuse keywords though, as you want your content to read naturally.

7. Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Make your business more approachable and genuine by integrating your social media platforms on your site when revamping web design. Nowadays most businesses have some kind of social media presence, and it’s a great idea to showcase this on your website. It will add a personable touch to your company and means you are more accessible to your visitors and customers.

8. Decrease Load Time

An aspect of revamping web design for your business that should not be overlooked is optimising your site’s technical performance. Decrease the load time of your website to improve user experience – visitors will not bother staying on your page if it takes too long to load. Compress images, clean up HTML code, and perhaps reduce the number of plugins you use on your site. This will not only improve UX but will also have massive SEO benefits.

9. Make It Mobile Friendly

Globally, people spend the majority of their time online on their phones, so optimising for mobile is a must if you want to retain the attention of your customers. When revamping web design for your business, this can’t be overlooked. In addition, mobile optimisation is a good way to improve your organic ranking on search engines.

10. Track Your Changes

Finally, any of the changes you want to implement when revamping the web design of your small business’ site have to be measured. You need to set metrics for measuring success, and this will differ according to the goals you have set.

If your focus is on acquisition, you should monitor the number of sessions, unique visitors, as well as new vs returning visitors. For measuring engagement, analyze time spent on your site, number of pages visited, and the bounce rate. Being able to convert visitors is another common and important goal to measure, and you can do this by looking at the number of online forms filled out, or perhaps registrations for an event.

Regardless of your reason for revamping the web design of your site, keep these ten pointers in mind when implementing changes. Your website is typically the first impression so it’s important to get it right!